December 7th

She woke up, it was dark out. Was it the middle of the night or had she slept through the day? Neither would be too shocking. Sometimes one falls asleep into a deep sleep, the kind that makes you drool, and by the time they awaken, the day is gone, but they are fully rested. The problem, though, is that one finally has enough energy to really be productive, but they need to be prepared to go back to sleep shortly or risk getting incredibly off-schedule. The alternate possibility is that she had merely woken up shortly after falling asleep and it was still night. Then she had the option of going back to sleep or potentially getting up and being productive, but she would need to be careful not to stop up all through the rest of the night without going back to sleep or the upcoming day would be hell to get through.

She decided to get up and have a look around. She went to have a drink of water.

This is fucking awful. I started with a few sentences. Oooh, I’m writing about a woman for once. What else can I do different? How about if the main character is a cat? Then I decided that would be the big reveal. Nothing I wrote about keeping a schedule applies to a cat as far as I am aware.

“So you’re going to just stop?”

I’ve had poetry on my mind and I don’t write poetry, but the thing I want to be good at again in getting that pristine sentence structure I used to have in my writing. A lot of what I wrote was pretty short, but I would go back and tweak until I liked how it read and it didn’t matter if it was a snap shot rather than a story. I don’t know if I am in the same mindset to pull off that sort of writing that lends itself to having a beautiful rhythm. But what I do know is that it is boring me to tears to try to write this garbage so how the fuck is someone else going to want to read it? Why would I get good at writing boring things? Yes, yes, I should try to practice different things, jump face-first into my weaknesses, but if this is the result, there’s no point.

“So you’re going to just give up for the night? Or you are going to write something else since you barely wrote anything so far?”

Well, I am pretty lazy, but I’m actually kind of mad about what I wrote so far. I spent a ton of time avoiding it and then writing a tiny bit and then avoiding it. I spent too much time to delete and start over. It’s there as evidence that I tried.

“So what are you going to write now?”

I think I’m going to write the dumbest thing I can conjure.

Pooping his pants wasn’t something he liked to do, but everyone expected him to do it. After eating someone else’s cooking, it was a show of appreciation to shit yourself in front of them. If you couldn’t shit yourself, then perhaps the food had caused indigestion.

He could not believe, growing up, that everyone else did this without complaint. It was so uncomfortable to have shit in your pants. And it increased the frequency one needed to do laundry. And you have to do your laundry on the extra soiled setting.

After about twenty years of shitting his pants like everyone else, he finally moved out of his parents’ home and was free to carry himself the way he saw fit. Of course, it wasn’t his parents who were the problem. They raised him the way every other child in society had been raised - shit your pants, don’t be rude.

So when he moved into an apartment by himself, he was able to finally avoid dinner parties and people cooking for him. He saved money by not eating out at the restaurants which was preferable to him because all of the good restaurants smelled like hundreds of people had shit their pants in the dining areas - because they had - and the restaurants where people had withheld their feces, as an insult to the staff, served bad food. More importantly, he avoided forging relationships. It didn’t start this way. He tried to befriend people in his life and then make up excuses when they invited him to have a meal with them. But eventually, they would be insulted by his absolute refusal to dine on the food they cooked. At some point, he realized that it was just easier to not befriend anyone.

He knew how it would go. They’d get along great until, one day, he’d be invited over to their home for dinner. He’d make an excuse. At this point, he’d gained a reputation so sometimes the single excuse was enough. He could see the look in their eyes. It was a look of betrayal, “oh? you feel that way about me too? I thought we were friends.” Sometimes it was how it used to be, he would make an excuse and they would accept. Then he would make another excuse and another and around the fifth one, they’d start to suspect something was up. And they would eventually stop inviting him over. Along with that, they’d stop talking to him in general.

As a result, he kept mostly to himself these days. He lived a somewhat agoraphobic lifestyle. But, of course, he still needed money. So he went to work at the dog food factory. In the breakroom, people would sometimes look at him weird when he didn’t shit his pants after eating lunch - trying to figure out if he was too humble or if he had such low self-esteem that he didn’t even praise his own cooking. But people left him alone, they weren’t friends with him.

One day Amelie started her shift at the dog food factory. He saw that twinkle in her eye. She was so young and not beaten down by life yet. But with youth comes inexperience. About halfway through her shift, he saw the dog food machine she was working on getting clogged and she seemed completely obvious. He looked around for a supervisor to assist her, but none were on the floor. It had been so long since he had interacted with anyone in any real capacity that he wasn’t really sure how to tell her she fucked up, but “friendly.”

“Uh…ummm… UHHHHH… your machine!”

“What?”

“The dog food processing machine, you have a jam.”

“Um, how do I fix it?”

“Here,” he said as he hit the POWER button to turn the machine off. Then he reached into the exit door and pulled out a biscuit that had lodged itself at an angle.

“Should be good to go now.”

“Thanks.”

He didn’t say anything. The interaction was over. The problem was resolved.

“Hey, what’s your name? I’m Amelie!”

“Fuck,” he thought in his head. “I’m Frederico,” he said aloud.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Here we go again,” he thought as he walked back to his station.

***

As he was leaving to head home at the end of his shift, Amelie ran up to him.

“Hey, thanks again. I really don’t know what I would do if I lost this job.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Here, let me buy you dinner to thank you.”

“Uh…I don’t really go to restaurants because they smell like shit.”

“Well, of course they smell like shit; everyone is shitting their pants inside of them.”

“Yeah, I don’t really like that. It smells bad.”

She lowered her voice just a slight bit as she responded, “to tell you the truth, I always thought it smelled awful, but nobody else seems to care.”

“I don’t really understand this custom where we shit our pants all the time.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty gross. I personally try to avoid doing it as much as possible by eating my own cooking alone.”

He smiled, “would you like to come try my cooking? No pants-shitting required.”

“So this is what you wrote instead of the cat thing?”

Yeah.

“And you’re happy with it?”

Well, the stakes were pretty low when I said that I was going to write the dumbest thing possible, but I think I accidentally pulled a nugget of truth out of all the pants-shitting stuff.

“And what is that?”

Well, I don’t know if I did it justice, but just the whole idea of this guy closing himself off from the rest of society because he’s too scared to speak up about his apparently unpopular opinion that people shouldn’t shit their pants.

“I can’t wait to see what you write tomorrow. That is sarcasm by the way.”